Slavery-era embroidery excites historians, evokes heartbreak of its time
It is a cotton sack with a story so poignant it is drawing in followers from across the country.
A yard-long piece of material known as "Ashley's Sack" has been getting attention since its national debut in Washington in September at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Ashley is believed to be a 9-year-old slave girl who received the sack as a goodbye gift from her mother, Rose, in the mid 1800s, when Ashley was being sold away from the South Carolina planter who owned them. The sack's history was embroidered in 1921 by Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth Jones Middleton, a member of black society in Philadelphia.
The sack reads: “My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina.” The embroidery continues to explain that the sack held "a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair." The artwork says Ruth told Ashley that the sack "be filled with my Love always.” It closes by offering that Rose never saw Ashley again. "Ashley is my grandmother," the embroidery reads. "Ruth Middleton 1921."
An historian who has traced the journey of the sack for years believes it can enlighten the country.
“With the terrible things we have done to one another as members of the American family, this kind of object is not the kind of thing you can turn your eyes away from,” said Mark Auslander, an anthropologist and director of the Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University. “I think that’s what makes it so important as a common meeting ground, which is what the whole museum is about," Auslander said.
But there is even more beneath that surface tension. Auslander, who has tracked the sack's history via census and land records, believes Ashley may have been sold because she may have been the product of a sexual assault by the plantation owner against her mother. Rose may have intended to give the sack special powers by enclosing a lock of her hair. The Tennessee flea market vendor who sold the collection of rags that included the sack vanished after the sale. And Auslander believes that the colors and placements of the words may communicate another layer of the story.
Auslander is hoping that the attention will help him locate black and white descendants of Ashley, Ruth and Rose, and has faith that someone among the readers of the sack's story will have some answers.
“I know it would be enormously moving if one day we could bring together the descendants of enslaving and enslaved who are so bound by this story and who may in fact be genetically related," he said.
The modern history of the sack begins in 2007, when a woman bought a bag of old cloth at a flea market in Springfield, Tenn., said Tracey Todd, vice president and chief operating officer of Middleton Place, a museum and plantation in Charleston, S.C., that housed four generations of the Middleton family.
The woman, who has asked Todd and Auslander to keep her identity hidden, was amazed when she found the old sack buried in her purchase, Todd said. Curious about the Middleton name, she did some research online and discovered Middleton Place, a former home and plantation of the Middleton family in Charleston, S.C., turned museum and historic site. She contacted Todd, then director of interpretive programming.
“I was like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing,” Todd said.
Race and history was fresh on the minds of employees because in 2006, they’d just hosted a reunion of black and white Middleton descendants, Todd said. Ashley's Sack went on display from 2009 to 2013, Todd said.
“It was like a magnet,” he said. “Many of the guides honestly had difficulty with it because they became emotional talking about it.”
As curators were planning the museum for the National Mall, they traveled the country, asking locals to bring out their artifacts. When the curators stopped in Charleston, Todd brought along Ashley's Sack. Middleton Place agreed to lend the sack to the much-anticipated site.
As Ashley's Sack became the subject of discussion, Auslander learned of its existence and felt drawn to it. He began a several-year quest to figure out the identities of Rose, Ashley and Ruth, tacking on additional trips to the East Coast for research whenever he had to travel for work. He powered through roadblocks, he said, such as the fact that Ashley was an extremely rare name for female slaves in that era, and the fact that slaves tended to show up in records only when they were being sold.
"We have a paucity of records about daily life," Auslander said.
Auslander said that he felt self-imposed pressure to authenticate the sack and to do it quickly -- not only because it was to be featured in the museum, but also because the current racial climate is leaning toward denial of certain events in history, he said.
“There is a strange war on memory that’s going on right now, denying the facts of chattel slavery, or claiming to have learned on Facebook or social media that, say, Irish slavery was worse, that white people were enslaved as well,” he said. “Not true.”
He believes Ashley may have been Sarah Clifton, who lived in Orangeburg County, S.C., in 1880, or Dosky or Dasky Clifton, who census records show lived between 1870 and 1880 in Columbia, S.C. He believes Sarah is the more likely candidate.
Ashley was probably born around 1844 and probably lived on the Barnwell County property of Charleston merchant and planter Robert Martin, Auslander said. Her mother, Rose, also was owned by Martin and worked in his Charleston household, according to Auslander. After Martin's death in 1852, Ashley was probably sold in 1853, Auslander said.
Auslander also believes that circumstances hint that the plantation owner sexually assaulted Rose. This is a tragedy that frequently took place in slave life but is little discussed.
“It’s pretty unusual to sell a 9-year-old,” Auslander said. “The old white mistress would have discerned in the face of Ashley her late master and therefore gotten rid of her,” he said.
Auslander also speculates that the braid of hair that Rose placed in the sack for Ashley was intended to give off some sort of power. Hair was considered sacred, he said.
“You can imagine whatever suffering that Rose was facing as a 19-year-old single mom, she’s telling her little girl that she comes from a strong line,” Auslander said.
Rose might have been sold off or died after Martin's death because she doesn't show up in 1870 census records regarding the Martin household in Charleston.
Auslander continues to work to fill in the blanks, but he believes that Ruth, the embroiderer and Ashley's granddaughter, was probably born in 1903. He has found evidence that she may have come from Orangeburg, S.C., and moved to Philadelphia to work for a wealthy white family. She became part of black Philadelphia society, and was confirmed at St. Simon the Cyrenian Episcopal Church, a faith home of the black establishment, Auslander said. He believes Ruth had one child, Dorothy Helen Middleton Page.
“(Philadelphia) was the kind of place you went to reinvent yourself or realize your potential,” Auslander said. “She very quickly starts to show up in the Philadelphia Tribune, hosting cocktail parties, wearing beautiful couture.”
Ruth was probably deliberate in her decisions as to the placement of words and colors used in the embroidery, Auslander said.
He notes that the central line is the only one that consists of a quote from Rose, and that “Love” is the largest word. “Jesus” is embroidered in red, which probably has meaning, he said. The colors of the words go from brown and end with green, he noted.
“Green is seen as a color of continuity, like with the coming of spring,” he said. “You could see where she’s starting with a neutral color, brown, then red, the blood of Jesus, a terrible sacrifice, ending with green. There’s a conjecture that she knows exactly what she’s doing.”
It is not known how Ashley's Sack traveled from Philadelphia to Tennessee. Dorothy Helen Middleton Page died in the Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote in 1988.
Auslander said it is impressive that the sack survived through so many transitions, through so much history, only to land at the museum being discussed around the world.
“It is amazing to think that Ashley somehow kept it with her throughout slavery, through the Civil War, at some point gave it to her own daughter,” Auslander said. “It just seems to me particularly beautiful and wonderful that it has come to a place like the new museum, that it actually comes to where it’s supposed to be and that is a very beautiful thing,” Auslander said.